CHAPTER 19

Years later, after so many retellings, there would come a time when any rhythm or flow to what happened that night was lost forever. The story, if there ever was one, was gone. Each moment seems to exist alone now, a snapshot full of shadows and bare knuckles and bared teeth, all of it washed over by the dull, orange streetlight glow that painted the whole world in a flat and lifeless shade of sick.

There is no narrative now, no “And then,” only a disjointed series of images. A pile of photographs I’ve flipped through so many times that I don’t even need to look at them anymore to know what’s there, to see it, to cover my face with my hands and cry.

There is Craig, stepping into the street, lit from above with lurching, shifting shadows playing under his nose and in his mouth.

There is Lindsay, looking back at me, the smile falling from her face and slinking away into the dark.

There is the song of the katydids, the rush of the wind, the small thud of moths committing slow suicide against the streetlight’s hypnotic orange bulb.

There are the men from Silver Lake, sure-footed despite the sour smell of alcohol on their breath, frozen in time beside the open door.

Their mouths are open.

The air is clammy.

Everywhere, people are shouting.

Craig called out and Lindsay moved, the angles of her body shifting, as though she wanted to go to him. I grabbed her arm.

“Don’t.”

He shouted, louder, “Lindsay!”

“Don’t,” I said again, urgency coloring my words red. She stared at me, confusion painting itself in lines between her eyebrows and at the corner of her mouth.

Every sound was sharp, barking, biting. The front door of the restaurant banged open again, and two more men spilled onto the street. Their too-loud voices ripped through the night as they spotted Craig. The men advanced in lockstep, like soldiers, smelling of whiskey. One of them pointed at Craig and called out angrily, a shout that was more noise than words.

In the sky overhead, the clouds had moved in low and fast, laced inside and underneath with the threatless flash of heat lightning. It burst in flickering threes, muted by the clouds. The leaves on the trees turned their blanched white bellies toward the wind. Rustling. Whispering. Sighing harshly as their dry bodies brushed together.

Lindsay had turned to look at me, her eyes searching my face for answers.

“Becca,” she started, and I looked over her shoulder to the place where Craig stood, heard the deliberate tread of his heavy shoes.

“Lindsay,” I said, and grabbed her by the wrist, to hold her there. My voice broke. “Lindsay, it’s him.”

I turned and pulled, feeling her tendons sliding under the thin skin of her forearm, trying to drag her back to the safe light and familiar sounds of the kitchen. She looked at me and then back at Craig, not understanding, seeing my fear but not knowing where it came from or why. She wrenched her wrist away.

“What are you talking about?” she shrieked back.

The words spilled out of me and winged away into the night.

“He was there!” I screamed. “He killed her!”

Lindsay looked at me as though I’d slapped her. She backed away from me, then turned to look at Craig.

And backed away from him.

“The police found his footprints, they found his tracks! And he’s been hiding it and lying to everyone all summer because he was there!”

Craig’s face was contorted with rage.

“LINDSAY!” he roared. “She’s out of her fucking mind! Come here, NOW!”

She turned to look at him with her eyes wide and her mouth trembling.

He glared back, breathing hard, his eyes full of hate and fear, the orange light washing over his face and glinting off the slimy fronts of his teeth. He took a step toward us.

The rock hit him in the face.

Craig yelped as it ricocheted away into the dark, where it hit and skittered drily against the ground. A dark spot, growing vertically as blood began to trickle down, had appeared on his forehead. My eyes traced an arc back to the hand of the tall man, the one with the small teeth and broken nose, still extended with its fingers splayed open in release.

One of them, not the rock thrower, a different, shorter shadow man with hard muscles and squat legs, said, “So.”

“You don’t want to do this,” Craig said, but the color drained from his face. He took a step backward.

“Of course we do,” the man slurred.

And they descended upon him.

* * *

The snapshots are disjointed, now, some of them out of order and some only half lit. The dark is full of movement, the staggering ballet of five men with whiskey in their veins and a score to settle, flailing arms and feet that windmill and rise and fall against the shadow on the ground.

There is Craig, with blood in his mouth, fighting.

There is Craig, with blood running from his nose, falling.

He’s big, powerful, built thickly and with heavy fists, but he is no match for ten hands and ten feet of righteous rage.

There is Lindsay, screaming.

Their blows landed everywhere, forcing Craig back against the car and then onto the ground, shouting. Screaming. Falling silent as he ducked his head between his arms and curled awkwardly on the asphalt. Every movement seemed to originate from the blur of hulking shadows and end somewhere on the prone body of the man on the ground. One of the standing group, less adept than the others, hung back and began to scream, his voice high-pitched and spiraling out of control.

“Tell us what you did! Tell us! Tell us what you did!”

Lindsay ran toward them, shouting something, begging them to stop, stop. Her outstretched hands looked like claws. One of the men caught her and pushed her back. She stumbled and fell to the ground, landing heavily on her knee on the unforgiving road. When she stood up, I could see blood and asphalt.

There is blood on the road.

The air is full of shouting.

Craig had stopped fighting back, had stopped recoiling from the blows that rained down on his heavy body, had gone limp and lifeless. The only sounds came from the men around him, the dull smack of fists on flesh, the asthmatic wheeze of one of the attackers as he sucked in air between punches, the scuff and strike of feet against the pavement. And in the trees, the raucous singsong of the katydids.

Lindsay, her face a slick mess of snot and tears, pushed past me and disappeared, screaming, into the restaurant.

I stayed. My legs had never felt so heavy. They were paralyzed, immovable. They weighed hundreds of pounds.

The hitting went on for minutes, hours, went on forever, until it stopped. Each man stood aside, one by one, shoulders rising and falling in tandem with the bulging, heaving shadows on the ground. Darker than the shadows, creeping in all directions, was blood. It poured out of Craig’s face, out of the place where his face should have been, where I could make out only the mottled hole of his mouth in a mass of wet meat. Air whistled through it, guttural, ragged. One of his teeth was on the ground.

One of the men turned his head away and said, “Oh, shit.”

Another sat heavily and all at once, collapsing gracelessly to the ground.

The lightning flashed again, rolling through the clouds, as everyone’s eyes rolled toward the sky. The brittle scratch of dry leaves came again; the wind lifted my hair from my neck. It moaned in my ears. The dull orange light brightened and then flickered, the shadows jumped and deepened. One of the men walked unsteadily toward the line of parked cars, two halting steps and then three quick ones, bent double, and vomited. It hit the ground like water.

Blood and vomit on the road.

Behind me, a door slammed. Somebody—Tom, I thought—said, “Oh, God.”

And then, slowly, the sick orange night was filled with color. Strobing reds and yellows that played like flickering Christmas on the trunks of the trees and the bare brick face of the bistro building, whites and reds and yellows that bathed us all in light. Ambulance. Police. People clustered and wandered in the street, some running, some shouting, two carrying a stretcher and two others flinging open the ambulance doors.

The chief, his shiny pate slicked with sweat, gave me a long look over someone else’s blood-spattered shoulder and then turned away.

Craig was on the stretcher, two men staggering with the weight of him, now joined by two more. He disappeared inside the ambulance. Lindsay was there, her face a mask of misery. She stood by her car, keys in hand, shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other as the doors closed and the siren sounded a mournful note. When they pulled away, I stepped forward and reached for her.

“Don’t fucking touch me,” she hissed.

“Linds—”

“DON’T!” she screamed, shoving me back. I stared at her, dumbly, while she slammed her car door and twisted the key in the ignition. Her eyes met mine; her lips were moving. When she pulled away, her tires left brief, dark tracks made of Craig’s blood.

In my head, I could still hear her voice—so quiet, but as smooth and clean as ice above the purr of the motor.

“You stupid bitch,” she’d said. “Don’t you get it?”

Don’t you get it?

You do not.

Fucking.

Belong here.